Gaming’s Long Con

Early video-game narratives were simple: The invaders are coming, shoot them down. Eat, don’t be eaten. “Avoid missing ball for high score,” as Pong intoned. A game’s story lasted until the player’s skill was exhausted; the more proficient the player, the longer the story (even if a typical extended plot was grimly predictable: more aliens died). In the economic crucible of the arcade, the worth of each quarter was measured in seconds.

A visit to the review directory Metacritic shows how high the premium on length is. Journey, a Sony-funded game about death and religion, which costs only fifteen dollars and runs for about two hours, received wide acclaim on the site, but nearly half of the reviewers also registered a complaint: “Journey’s short length makes it difficult to wholeheartedly recommend,” one wrote. Another said, “Journey is short. Too short.” More recently, the celebrated game director Ken Levine felt compelled to reply to critics who griped that his new two-hour addition to last year’s critically hailed bestseller Bioshock Infinite was too brief. He had opted for “quality over quantity,” he said. “Few people would judge a movie based on how long it is.”

Length, surely, is a simple way of measuring any time-based art or entertainment. Merely passing the hours is no substitute for aesthetic wonder. Innumerable sixty-odd-hour Tolkienesque adventure games are bloated with mind-numbing combat sequences and meandering, indulgent story lines. Games in the Final Fantasy series have grown longer with each entry, but the most recent installments are generally less memorable than the earlier, more succinct ones in terms of their narrative.

The sprawl derives in part from the gaming industry’s long-held desire to be taken as seriously as film (note Levine’s pleading comparison to the elder medium), and even by some game designers’ foiled aspirations to be directors. Consider a new game based on Ridley Scott’s 1979 film “Alien” currently being developed by the British studio Creative Assembly. To help the studio recreate the original film’s look, Twentieth Century Fox has opened its underground vaults to the game’s development team, granting it access to previously unseen production material. Storyboards for the game have been drawn in the same style as those created for the movie, with a felt-tip pen, and even some of the musicians who played on the film’s score in 1979 contributed to the game’s soundtrack. But the expectation that a high-production commercial video game should last a minimum of ten hours presents a problem that no amount of reference material can solve: How do you expand a film that ran just under two hours by a factor of five or six? There are rumors that the team has introduced new enemies and settings in order to extend the length—at the obvious risk of diluting or entirely spoiling Scott’s concept.

Unlike films, where the narrative progresses at a rate set by the director, video games have no fixed running time; what takes one player an hour to complete may take another player three, depending on his skill or tenacity. In this way, playing a game is closer to reading a book, where the rate of consumption is dictated by the aptitude (or interest) of its consumer. Gamemakers often err on the side of caution, stuffing their creations with as much material as possible, lest they face the accusation that the work is insubstantial—not in terms of the weight of its message or meaning but in mere terms of its bulk.

There are games whose strength is in their concision. Brevity and succinctness force creators to think more rigorously about the story, trimming away unnecessary adornments and placing greater emphasis on the game’s mechanics. Papers, Please is an interactive examination of what it might have been like to work as a passport-control agent in a European Communist state in the early nineteen-eighties that lasts only a couple of hours. Its impact reverberates far longer. Portal, a near-perfect game by Valve, fully unravels its story and ideas within a delicious and memorable three hours. (Some critics complained about its length anyway.)

As novelists age, their novels often contract, revealing a distillation of form and technique—or, perhaps, a crotchety intolerance for verbosity. Maybe this will prove true for mainstream gamemakers, as well, and the expectations of players. While the average age of a video-game consumer is reportedly in the mid-thirties, the industry still markets its blockbuster titles to the young, with their relative absence of responsibility, surplus of free time, and, often, more limited funds. For the young, a game’s value is inextricably linked to its longevity. But tastes change: as Saul Bellow once quoted Anton Chekhov saying, “The older I get, everything I read strikes me as not short enough.”